The Meltdown

THE MELTDOWN....As a nonexpert, one of the things that always astonishes me about limited financial panics is the way they almnost inevitably turn into widespread panics. Bankers, those rock-jawed titans of capitalism, get scared about something or another, and once they get scared they just decide to stop loaning money to anyone. The latest example is the subprime meltdown, which has apparently caused banks not merely to panic about the subprime market, or even just the mortgage market in general, but to panic about any commercial lending. Even big, AAA-rated companies are having trouble getting ordinary business loans.

[The] most pernicious problem is that it is becoming clear central banks cannot resolve the biggest problem  a lack of clarity about valuations in structured credit markets and the almost complete loss of confidence that is infecting even the biggest and most diversified of conduit-type programmes.

So the bottom line is that ordinary commercial loans have increasingly been rolled up into a variety of "structured investment vehicles," and thanks to ripple effects from the subprime meltdown nobody has any confidence they really know how to value SIVs anymore. So they just stop issuing them, and that in turn halts the ordinary commercial paper market in its tracks. Apparently the panic started in Europe and then quickly spread to the U.S.

At least, I think that's the explanation here. Read the whole thing yourself for more. If you're a high finance type and want to explain further in comments, please do. It's still all kind of murky to me.